November 28 in History

Three battered ships sailed out of a narrow, storm-lashed strait and into an ocean so vast and calm that their captain wept. Ferdinand Magellan, having spent 38 days navigating the treacherous passage at the southern tip of South America, emerged into the Pacific on November 28, 1520. He named it the Mar Pacífico, the peaceful sea, because after the savage straits behind him, its stillness seemed miraculous. Magellan had departed Spain fourteen months earlier with five ships and roughly 270 men, commissioned by King Charles I to find a westward route to the Spice Islands. The voyage was troubled from the start. Spanish officers resented serving under a Portuguese captain. A mutiny at Port San Julián cost Magellan one ship and nearly his command. He executed the ringleaders and pressed on. When his fleet reached the strait that bears his name, a fourth ship deserted and sailed back to Spain. The passage through the strait was a navigational nightmare: 350 miles of narrow channels, sheer rock walls, violent currents, and freezing rain. Magellan threaded his three remaining ships through while Fuegian natives lit bonfires on the southern shore, giving Tierra del Fuego its name. No European had ever navigated this passage, and the accomplishment required extraordinary seamanship and nerve. The Pacific crossing was far worse. Magellan underestimated the ocean's width by a factor of four. His crew sailed for 99 days without resupply, eating sawdust, leather strips, and rats sold for half a ducat each. Nineteen men died of scurvy. Magellan was killed in a skirmish in the Philippines in April 1521. Only one ship, the Victoria, completed the circumnavigation, arriving in Spain in September 1522 with 18 survivors. The voyage proved the Earth was round and far larger than anyone had imagined.

Twelve men gathered after a lecture at Gresham College in London on November 28, 1660, and decided to form a society dedicated to the experimental investigation of nature. Among them were Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle, and John Wilkins, a clergyman with insatiable curiosity about everything from beekeeping to the possibility of life on the moon. Their club would become the Royal Society, the world's oldest continuously operating scientific institution. The group had been meeting informally for years, part of a network calling themselves the "Invisible College." What distinguished their approach was an insistence on empirical evidence and reproducible experiments. They rejected the authority of ancient texts in favor of direct observation. Their motto, "Nullius in verba" (take nobody's word for it), challenged the Aristotelian tradition that had dominated European intellectual life for two millennia. King Charles II granted a royal charter in 1662. The early Fellows threw themselves into an astonishing range of investigations: blood transfusions, the behavior of gases under pressure, insect anatomy, pendulum mechanics, and telescope improvement. Robert Hooke, the first curator of experiments, was expected to demonstrate three or four new experiments at every weekly meeting, a punishing schedule that nonetheless produced groundbreaking work in microscopy and elasticity. The Royal Society published Isaac Newton's "Principia Mathematica" in 1687, arguably the most important scientific work ever written. Over the centuries, its Fellows included Darwin, Faraday, Hawking, and hundreds of others who shaped the modern world. The decision made by twelve curious men in a London college room launched an institution that helped transform science from a gentleman's hobby into the engine of human progress.

For the first time in journalism's history, a newspaper was printed without human hands pressing type to paper. On November 28, 1814, The Times of London rolled off steam-powered presses built by Friedrich Koenig and Andreas Bauer, producing 1,100 copies per hour, more than four times the speed of hand-operated presses. Publisher John Walter II revealed the change only after the edition was complete, fearing his pressmen would destroy the machines. Walter's fear was justified. The compositors and pressmen understood immediately that the technology threatened their livelihoods. Koenig and Bauer had developed their press in secret for several years. Walter arranged for the first steam-printed edition to be produced overnight by a skeleton crew. When the regular pressmen arrived, Walter presented them with the finished newspaper and told them they could accept it or leave. He offered compensation to displaced workers, though the transition was neither smooth nor painless. Koenig's press used steam power to drive the impression cylinder, automating the most physically demanding part of printing. The machine could print both sides of a sheet, a capability hand presses lacked without repositioning the paper. The speed increase made it possible for a daily newspaper to serve a much larger readership than ever before. Cheap, fast printing made newspapers affordable for the emerging middle class, transforming public discourse and political accountability. Within two decades, steam presses had spread across Europe and America. The Times's circulation surged, making it the dominant newspaper in the English-speaking world for much of the 19th century. The technology Walter unveiled that November morning was the foundation of mass media.

A motorized carriage sputtered through snow and slush on a Chicago November, covering 54 miles in just under eight hours at an average speed of seven and a half miles per hour. Frank Duryea won America's first automobile race on November 28, 1895, beating five competitors in a contest organized by the Chicago Times-Herald to demonstrate the potential of the "motocycle." The event was part endurance test, part publicity stunt, and part prophecy. The race attracted over 80 initial entries, but freezing temperatures, heavy snow, and the unreliability of early automotive technology whittled the field to six starters. The course ran from Chicago's Jackson Park to Evanston and back through streets covered in fresh snow. Frank Duryea drove a gasoline-powered vehicle he and his brother Charles had designed and built in their Springfield, Massachusetts, workshop. The Duryea Motor Wagon Company would become the first American firm to manufacture gasoline automobiles. The race was grueling. Several competitors broke down or crashed. The second-place finisher, a German-built Benz, arrived almost an hour and a half after Duryea. One electric car dropped out when its batteries drained. Another driver fell asleep at the tiller from exhaustion. A crowd of spectators, most skeptical of the machines, watched with a mixture of curiosity and amusement as the wheezing vehicles limped past. The Times-Herald covered the race extensively, introducing many Americans to the automobile for the first time. Within a decade, Henry Ford would begin mass-producing cars that transformed American life. Duryea's victory in a Chicago snowstorm was a humble beginning for an industry that would reshape the landscape, economy, and culture of the United States more profoundly than any technology since the railroad.

Enrico Fermi left Italy in 1938 the night he received the Nobel Prize in Stockholm, collecting his family and flying to New York instead of returning home. Mussolini's racial laws had targeted his Jewish wife. In Chicago in 1942, under the squash courts at the University of Chicago, he achieved the first controlled nuclear chain reaction. He used 45,000 graphite bricks, 6 tons of uranium metal, and 50 tons of uranium oxide. And then he went to lunch.